Just a tick

On Thursday July 2nd I went to bed, feeling really low.  By Monday, still barely able to get out of bed, I figured something was really wrong and went to the clinic.  A blood test confirmed anaplasmosis, one of the tick borne diseases less well known than Lyme but equally nasty.  They put me right on doxycycline, and I started improving.  But it’s been a slog, with just a few good hours a day and an ongoing need for loads of rest.  Just a little tick I never even saw – but it laid me low.  We’re so vulnerable.

We’ve done a great deal to increase the tick population across the country.  When I was a kid, spending summers in woods not too far south of here, we knew about ticks, but they were a rarity.  Now they’re a plague.  The warming climate helped them spread north, and the great increase in the deer population, now that we’ve eliminated their predators, means plenty of hosts to carry the ticks from place to place.  Walking with Fanny (who is protected with monthly flea meds) it’s inevitable that I would encounter ticks.  There’s more I can do to protect myself, but until I got sick, it was easy to be a little slack about checking myself over after every walk and I hadn’t invested in repellent treated socks.

The surge in the tick population and the attendant harm to human health is just one of dozens of examples of the mess we’re making of our only home.  It’s easy to get depressed about it.  But so many people around here don’t get depressed, they get engaged.  There’s a big contingent of professionals, students and volunteers who are working to at least reduce some of the harm and raise awareness.  We have an outpost of the State University of New York at Oneonta here in Cooperstown – the Biological Field Station.  Students and faculty do a variety of monitoring tasks, with special focus on our beautiful Glimmerglass Lake, now invaded every year with toxic algae.  There’s a very active volunteer-driven Otsego County Conservation Association, there’s the Otsego Lake Association, the Watershed Commission, the Cornell Extension and more, all of these groups working to identify and reduce the harm we’re doing.

There’s an intimacy and immediacy to that kind of civic engagement here.  You’ll be volunteering with friends and neighbors.  Perhaps your kids go to school together.  You’ll meet at the Farmer’s Market, and at the Natural Food Store.  You’ll run into each other at the film festival or at Mel’s Restaurant or Bocca.  What you’re working to save is a small part of the big work that needs to be done, but it’s the part you see, smell, touch and hear every day.  Your friends get tick borne diseases so much more often now.  Before I got my bite I knew of several friends and acquaintances who had gotten Lyme this season.

We see that same intimacy and immediacy in local government.  The Town of Otsego, which the Village of Cooperstown is part of, recently had a public hearing on the proposed Comprehensive Plan.  Jay sits on the Town Board, and I was his chauffeur that night as he was still recovering from retina surgery. (He’s doing great now.)  I probably wouldn’t have gone if he hadn’t needed a ride, but I was glad I did.  There was quite a crowd, and strong feelings on a couple of issues, limiting short term rentals (which are very lucrative, but reduce the housing supply for permanent residents) and limitations on dividing large parcels of land.  These issues are not abstract.  People rely on the income from short term rentals, and in many cases have done so for years.  The people who spoke are people we know, their lives are real to us.  The revisions will be done by our friends, women I’m in the League with, and other neighbors. This web of community works to meet everyone’s needs as best as it can, to plan for land use and to figure out how to keep our beautiful lake safe and to reduce the ticks’ uses of our fragile bodies.